y well, I judged. He
certainly wasn't in my college class, for it would have come up, I was
sure, in our talk. Not that we talked much. It was a stuffy,
disagreeable ride, and I was alternately vexed with Roger and worried
about him. In a hopelessly foolish manner I connected the razors and
the parson, too closely for any reasonable inference in regard to the
latter. I knew the connection was ridiculous but it was persistent,
and as I had lost all hope of placing the man sitting beside me, my
mind was altogether in a horrid muddle. Once he asked me abruptly if
Roger were an Episcopalian.

"No," I answered, "he--his people are Unitarians."

"I'm a Congregationalist, as you know, of course," he went on, "but if
it makes no more difference to Roger than it will to me, there'll be
no trouble."

"Anyone would suppose he was going to christen Roger," I thought
disgustedly and returned to my troublesome thoughts, replying absently
that it would be all right, of course.

We changed cars at S---- and got into a queer little local train
filled with young village roughs, whose noisy horseplay annoyed me
exceedingly. My mysterious parson, however, was deeply interested in
them and related incident after incident in proof of what could be
accomplished with this offensive part of the rural population by
social organisation under competent direction. He even got out an old
letter and proved to me on the back of it, with a stub of a pencil,
what a pitiful outlay in money was sufficient to start a practical
boys' club, including the rent of a second-hand piano, to be purchased
ultimately on the instalment plan. In the midst of this lecture (it
was no less) I fell asleep, uncomfortably and rudely, and it was he
who shook me awake at last and carried the bag out of the close car.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MISTS OF EDEN

The station lights flared pale in the coming dawn. Behind the barred
window of the ticket-office, which contained, as its bright lamp
showed, a tumbled cot bed and a dilapidated arm-chair, a tousled young
man sat playing Patience in his nightshirt on the telegraph table. We
battered on his window, and to our amazement he nodded casually and
entirely without surprise at us, reached into a corner of his littered
room, grasped a pair of oars, and, pushing up the window, poked them
out at us between the bars.

"Mr. Jerrolds, I guess," he remarked. "Mr. Bradley's left the boat for
you at the foot of the dock, little